Tuesday, October 31, 2017

One of the definitions of
insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different
results.For some reason politicians and
members of boards of education think that requiring more and more difficult
tests and making these tests high stakes will improve the quality of education
our students are receiving.

In the mid-seventies (yes
that long ago), the State Superintendent of Schools instituted a testing
program called Project Basic.The idea
was that the kids would all have basic skills in reading and math before they
graduated.It didn’t work.Then came MSPAP, this program was performance
based and took hours to administer.That
didn’t work either.But hey, we weren’t
done yet.Next came the High School Assessments.These were high stakes.No pass, no graduate.Except that too many kids didn’t pass, so the
bridge plans were born.The latest and
greatest of this foolishness is the PARCC tests based on the Common Core
Curriculum.About a year ago, the Maryland
State Board of Education put into place standards for passing these tests.The goal was that the passing score would
increase each year.But that
“aspirational goal” has been put on hold since at the last administration only
about 40% of the students passed the test.Now the State Board had said that it will be today’s current 6th
graders who will be held to the standard for graduation.Until 2024, students will need to score at
least a 3 on the tests for English and algebra on a scale of 1-5.A score of 4 indicates a student will be able
to do college level work.The funny
thing is that even though Project Basic, MSPAP, HSA, and now PARCC were all going to prepare students for college- the kids AREN’T
getting better at being prepared for college work.Zero credit courses required for non-prepared
students continue to enroll far too many undergraduates, costing them both time
and money to learn what should have been learned in high school. Colleges report an increase in the number of freshmen needing to take these tests.

Maryland’s high school
graduation rate is 80%, its pass rate on the PARCC is 40%.Obviously, there is a big disconnect.

There has been some discussion on the State
Board about a bold NEW idea.Under this
system, Maryland would award two different diplomas.One would recognize the student as college
ready and the other one would recognize the student as “not-college”
ready.There are two things wrong with
this great NEW idea.

First of all, 50+ years ago
Maryland had three different high school diplomas- academic,
commercial/vocational, and general.The
diplomas recognized the differing talents and aspirations of the students.Each diploma had different requirements
depending upon what was required for the student’s goals.None of these diplomas addressed what the
award was not.So, the idea is of multiple diplomas is not so
new.

Secondly, labeling an award
by what it is not is disrespectful to the students, their families and our
community.I recently needed to install
some lighting fixtures.I called an
electrician.He did not go to
college.He could install my
fixtures.I did go to college; I
couldn’t do it.Being vocationally
trained is not embarrassing to anindividual or family. Why are State Board members acting like it is.

Smarick, the Board Chair, is
worried as well about the number of bridge projects being used by students in
low-income districts in order to meet the standard.

For once, the Union is
voicing its strong position to tying graduation to an “arbitrary standard that
was set by a private testing company.”

Steiner believes “students
will gradually begin to live up to the higher standard, but until that time the
Board cannot set the standard too high.”“Politically,” he said, “it’s not conceivable in any state that a high
school graduation rate would go below 70 percent.”Now that’s putting us in touch with reality.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Compromise is a good thing,
or maybe not.Donald Trump has
compromised the Office of the President by his immature and narcissistic
behaviors.The teachers’ professional
labor unions have compromised the education of the children for whose education
they have been entrusted.

Years after No Child Left
Behind was going to guarantee us all students would be on grade level by requiring repeated
testing, our high school graduates are still entering college unprepared to do
the work of higher education.They waste
time and money taking zero credit courses teaching material that was supposed to be
learned in high school. All the testing didn't do it.

Federal legislation was also supposed
to bring us highly qualified teachers.That didn’t work out either and it is not unusual for principals to rate
well over 90% of their teachers as excellent and almost no one as needing
improvement.We are testing children in
kindergarten to find out what they need in reading and math, but pay no
attention to what they need in social skills and emotional health.Just what is kindergarten for?Illinois is looking for ways to cut the
requirements to teach so that they can fill the teacher ranks with warm bodies,
not so kids will be better taught.

We need to get back to our
roots in education.Here is what I think
that means.We pay teachers a decent
salary but stop trying to bribe them with more money.Teaching has never been about money.Instead we show we respect their
professionalism by allowing them to decide the pace of instruction and what the
kids need.We reduce the paperwork so
energy can go into instructional preparation and individualization instead of
creating paper trails that do not help kids but do cover the behind of the
school system.We hold teachers
accountable for the emotional well-being of the children within the scope of
what they can do.We let teachers
develop relationships with kids so every child has another adult besides his/her parents who he or she can trust.And
for those kids who can’t trust their parents, at least there is one responsible adult in
their lives.Stop with all the
testing.Any teacher worth her salt
knows which students are keeping up, which ones are ahead of the pack and who
are falling behind.A good teacher does
not need a test to tell her that.

Can we stop compromising the education of children?Can so-called
professional unions get their mojo back and start caring about the kids instead
of their own well being?

In the 1960’s, during the
Viet Nm war young people protested the draft by chanting “hell no, we won’t go”.Nancy Regan suggested we just say no to drug
addiction.Perhaps it is time to return
to the last century and stop all these compromises.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Well over half of our local
and state tax money goes into the cost of public education.Why do we invest so much of our money in that
one expense?Very early in our nation’s
history it was determined that education was a necessary community cost to
provide an educated informed electorate to make democracy function.

Now we are engaged in another
great civil war.Testing, yet again,
whether a nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.How long can we go on hating the “other” and
expect our democracy to survive.Make no
mistake about it, humanity and our country have a very long history of hating
and attempting to purge the “other” dating back to the original Americans, our
native Americans.Abraham Lincoln toyed
with the idea of sending enslaved people back to their land of ancestry.We pretended we did not notice that most of
those people were now born in the U.S.In the earliest 20th Century we pitted the Irish against the
Italians, and barred female Chinese from coming to this country in the hopes of reducing the number of
Chinese in our country. During WWII we removed native born Japanese Americans to detention campus because we didn't trust them. We were fighting the Germans too but German Americans weren't locked up because they looked a lot like the rest of us. We have
institutionalized discrimination again women, Jews, African-Americans- you name
a group and we have hated them.We have
not stopped until the present day.Currently the Muslims are up for discrimination.We have a government that is intent on
targeting our differences instead of our similarities.

The problem is that presently
our country is approaching the tipping point of becoming a majority minority
nation.Our public schools are already
there.

So, what are we going to do
about how we educate our kids for this new reality.How do we get our children ready to live
together in understanding.Failure to
achieve this basic goal will tear our democracy apart.The primary purpose of the taxpayers
financing education is to facilitate the functioning of a democracy.We need to get back to that.

What do we need to do?Every high school student should have a
course on understanding our nation’s diversity.Kids that go to one dimensional schools should be given experiences with
the “other”.It is hard to hate people
you have had a burger with or solved a problem with.Familiarity does not only breed contempt, it
can also forge understanding and the others' perspective.

Younger children should be
allowed to accept differences in others.If we do not teach them to hate and fear early on, who knows they may not when they get older.

Our nation will survive
failing algebra skills it will not survive failing understanding and empathy
for each other.No less than our
survival as a nation is at stake if we do not get our children ready to take
over as the next generation of leadership.

About Me

I have been in the field of special education for 53 years. I have taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. I also have been an administrator of a local school system's special education department and the assistant superintendent for special education for the Maryland State Department of Education. Thirty-three years ago I started The Harbour School a special private school for children with autism, learning disabilities and other learning challenges.